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Lone male genius gets centre stage in All but Gone: review

The collection of short plays by Samuel Beckett is offered as an abstract experiment, but the way the material is organized reinforces a tired gender binary — women feel, men act.

Paul Fauteux adopts a sad-clown persona in Act Without Words II, where he and Jonathon Young emerge from sacks on stage. (Faisal Lutchmedial)

By Karen FrickerTheatre Critic

Sat., Oct. 15, 2016

All but Gone

Written by Samuel Beckett, music by Garrett Sholdice and Kaija Saariaho, directed by Jennifer Tarver, musical direction by Dairine Ni Mheadhra. Until November 6 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. Canadianstage.com and 416-368-3110.

This new production follows on from ( presented at Canadian Stage four years ago with the silly title of Beckett: Feck It! (which I did not see). In both, director Jennifer Tarver and music director Dairine Ni Mheadhra interweave four short plays by Samuel Beckett with contemporary vocal music.

Three of the four plays here were also in Beckett: Feck It!, but the musical compositions, by Garrett Sholdice and Kaija Saariaho, are new to this version, as are the four highly skilled performers.

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What she and Ni Mheadhra were interested in when re-approaching this material, Tarver says in a program note, is the use of music to explore the “underbelly” of Beckett’s imagery — that is, to suggest subtext and relationship, and play out emotions running below the playwright’s famously austere writing (so austere, in this instance, that two of the four plays don’t even include speech). This evening’s subtitle — “A Beckett Rhapsody” — further suggests how to interpret it: a rhapsody is a musical composition without formal structure that expresses strong feeling.

As much as this is offered as an abstracted experiment, however, the way in which the material is organized sends an accumulated message of reverence, even conservatism, that battles with the attempted innovation. The musical performances delivered by women are framing devices for the plays (largely performed by men) but there is no overlap or interweaving.

What starts by contrasting female expressiveness with men’s futile attempts at agency ends with the image of a male artist alone onstage, with the apparatus of theatre exposed around him, and the tired gender binary (women feel, men act — or at least have the potential to do so) reinforced.

We begin with Shannon Mercer and Kristina Szabo descending the aisles of the Berkeley Street Theatre, singing an intense piece by Sholdice in Latin, without accompaniment. That most audience members can’t understand these lyrics (or indeed much of those in Saariaho’s composition, which is set to words by Sylvia Plath in English) is clearly not the point: the complexity of the music, and the intense emotional engagement the women have with each other as they sing, are what is most striking and impressive.

They pull back a long blue curtain (the adept, simple design is by Patrick Lavender) to reveal the actor Paul Fauteux, who performs Act Without Words I, in which a man is thrown into the playing area from offstage, ordered around by a whistle, and frustrated as a bottle of water that descends from the flies persistently evades his grasp. Fauteux plays this as mopey and diffident, worn down as his attempts to take control over his very circumscribed life are foiled again and again.

Mercer and Szabo sing again to cover the set change into Act Without Words II, in which Fauteux, adopting the same sad-clown persona, is joined by the more antic and rubber-limbed Jonathon Young. Each at a time — prodded by a long pole that comically appears from offstage — the two men emerge from sacks, put on and take off the same tatty suit, go through daily rituals, walk over each other’s bodies, and retire again into their sack. Unlike Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (who Tarver sees as predecessors of these figures), they don’t speak and never interact, but these deftly contrasting performances communicate two very different ways of dealing with life’s futility.

Next, Fauteux discovers a standing lighting instrument and sits in the audience to run the action of Play, in which a husband, wife, and mistress — sitting up to their necks in side-by-side urns — narrate their torturous love/hate triangle in very rapid-fire dialogue. They only speak when the light held by Fauteux hits their face.

Play feels like the odd piece out in its focus on marital discord rather than broader existential questions, chosen perhaps because it gives Mercer and Szabó further performance opportunities, albeit ones which limit female identity to the roles of betrayed and betraying shrews. As presented here, Beckett’s satire of posh English drawing-room drama doesn’t really come through.

As the action moves into the final play, Ohio Impromptu, a black curtain is drawn back to reveal all the show’s props and set pieces. Theatrical representation has broken down: we’re honing in on some kind of pure communication. Fauteux is again nominally the controlling figure. He and Young sit at a table dressed identically and Young reads aloud the last pages of a book about a person mourning a loss, stopping and starting when Fauteux raps his fist.

If we follow one of the standard interpretations of this piece — that both figures are parts of the same person, the person who is mourning the loss the book refers to — then this becomes an Escher-like meta-performance, and if you open up the last stacking Russian doll what might be revealed is the author himself.

For this audience member, the message is clear: you wrestle with Beckett and you can’t get beyond Beckett. The music’s gone, the women are gone, and the lone male genius remains centre stage. Might things have transpired differently if the music was really made to intervene with the master’s vision?

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